Games such as mah-jong where played. Mah-jong, a game based on games of ancient Chinese origin that was introduced into the United States in the 1920s and enjoyed enormous popularity in the succeeding decade.
Transport was especially different from our own. “Rickshaws” where the most common and cheapest way of getting around. A rickshaw is a two-wheeled carriage with a person at the front pulling it.
Yen Mah’s life was far from perfect. When her Nai Nai died it was like she had lost another mother. The funeral was a lot different than a funeral in our country, ‘Buddhist monks dressed in long robes chanted their mantras…sleep on the floor in the same room to keep Nai Nai company’. ‘The coffin was draped with white sheets and placed on a hearse pulled by four men. Dressed in white robes…white headbands for the boys and white ribbons for us girls’. White is usually worn for weddings or happy occasions, black is the normal colour worn at funerals in our country, another tradition in China.
When Yen Mah’s mother died her father needed to find another wife as he alone couldn’t look after his children. Niang, a seventeen-year-old French woman, was Yen Mah’s new mother. Unlike here, women were head of the family in China. When Yen Mah’s mother died Nai Nai became the head. Now it was Niang who was the head of the family. Wherever you went in China French people were classed higher than Chinese people and having a French wife would be useful. The move from Tianjin to Shanaghai was to get away from the Japanese concession, as it was this concession who wanted Yen Mah’s father. Their new house was situated on ‘Avenue Joffre, deep in the heart of the French concession…surrounded by a communal wall’. Niang, now the new head of the family, is very one-sided as she treats her own children far better than her stepchildren. ‘The first floor is where your father and I, and your younger bother and sister have our rooms, you are not allowed to enter any of the rooms on our floor without permission…I have enrolled all of you at very expensive private missionary schools’.
Niang ranks herself highly over every one with her children having special privileges over Yen Mah and her brothers and sisters. When Niang’s own baby arrived in Shanghai she didn’t know who her mother was, ‘Don’t want you, little sister said directly to Niang in a distinct voice, don’t like you go away’, when Niang begins to beat her baby child, no one in the room does a thing as Niang does what she likes as she’s head of the family. Yen Mah said, ‘don’t beat her any more she is only a baby’. She had broken the tradition, the tradition that ranked Niang over everyone, Yen Mah had spoken against Niang the worst thing she could do. ‘You’d better watch out from now on, you will pay for your arrogance’ the word pay in italics really sends a shiver down the spine, just showing how powerful Niang really is.
New Year is celebrated on January the 1st, but for Chinese people its starts on the first day of the first New Moon on the New Year and ends on the full moon 15 days later. The Chinese Lunar Calendar names each of the twelve years after an animal. Legend has it that the Lord Buddha summoned all the animals to come to him before he departed from earth. Only twelve came to bid him farewell and as a reward he named a year after each one in the order they arrived, Rat, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Sheep, Monkey, Roster, Dog and Bear. In China new clothes are worn on New Year’s Day to signal a new beginning. The clothes Yen Mah and her brothers and sisters got were nothing compared to Niang’s children’s clothes, ‘what gets me…is the blatant inequality between her children and us…if they really believed in traditional clothes then all seven children should be wearing the same’.
In August 1945 when Yen Mah was eight years old, America dropped the ‘Atom bomb’ on Japan, which ended the Second World War. The blast destroyed 68 percent of the city, damaged another 24 percent, and an estimated 60,000 to 70,000 people were killed. America, now the new conqueror, were “China’s new heroes”. Yen Mah goes on to say ‘Hollywood movies swept into Shanghai like a tidal wave…hotels and office buildings on the Bund were taken over by the US Navy’, China was finally peaceful once again.
Niang was fairly popular and had many friends. They all knew of her marriage and children but not of her stepchildren. ‘Most of Niang’s friends were unaware that she had five stepchildren…only two children Fourth Brother and Little Sister’. When gifts came from some of fathers’ friends for all eleven of the children they were delighted to see that eleven baby ducklings for each of them. But Niang being herself gave her children the biggest ducklings first and Yen Mah was left with the smallest light duck, this shows how Niang overpowered everyone in the house and considered her children better over her husbands.
Marriage in China was often forced or arranged by the parents, unlike now where you get down on one knee and propose. For Yen Mah’s Big Sister that is what happened. She was to marry a thirty one year old man She was only 17, like her father and Niang. ‘When I get to be seventeen I sure don’t want to be taken out of school to marry someone I’ve just met, especially when he is so much older’, Big Sister was adversely forced into marriage by Niang and her father. Traditional wear was worn for the wedding, ‘my brothers heads were shaved cleanly…they wore identical, dark-blue traditional long Chinese robes with high collars and cloth buttons’, ‘women were bejewelled and in silk qipaos or formal Western gowns’.
The China Yen Mah had always known was changing before her very eyes. ‘Ye Ye and Nai Nai were both born during the Qing Dynasty which ruled China for 267 years’. The Manchus of Manchuria established the Qing dynasty. The Manchus were foreign invaders of China who adopted elements of the Chinese culture. They adapted most of their structure of government from that of the previous Ming dynasty. In 1937 Japanese invaded, Chiang controlled most of China, but the communists under Mao Ze-dong were gaining momentum. Between 1937 and 1945 the Nationalists and Communists formed a united front to fight the Japanese. After the Japanese surrendered in 1945 the civil war resumed between Mao Ze-dong and Chiang Kai-shek for the control of China. For Yen Mah this was the least of her troubles. When she was at the airport and her father was filling out her “landing card” he had forgotten her Chinese name ‘I’m afraid I’ve forgotten your Chinese name, is it Jun-qing…no father, mine is Jun-ling’ Niang had had a large impact on Yen Mah’s father. He could remember his wife’s children’s names but not his own, and he could not remember her date of birth either, nor could Yen Mah. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know father…in our family the stepchildren’s birthdays were unknown’. In the end he gave her his birth date, a sign that Niang had made her husband forget about his own children.
When Yen Mah was put into boarding school in Hong Kong by her stepmother it was clear that she was no longer wanted by anyone. Yen Mah went through boarding school topping her classes and skipping grades. ‘ The next year she skipped a grade and attended form 3…they’re encouraging her to skip another grade going into form 5’. Yen Mah never spoke to her father or Niang throughout the 3 grades she was in school. Although she never had visits Niang asked her home at the end of term. Yen Mah feels terrified, ‘I’m terrified…I don’t know what they have in store’. Ye Ye talks to her in an attempt to boost her moral. ‘Don’t talk like that…everything is possible…the world is changing, you must rely on yourself’. Ye Ye proves Yen Mah wrong and convinces her to do something in her life and she ends up entering a ‘play-writing completion open to English-speaking children from all over the world’. Yen Mah entered the competition for Ye Ye and wanted to win it for him. Once again the chauffeur came to pick her up but she never knew her Ye Ye had died. After the funeral Niang called Yen Mah into the living room, ‘she instructed me to look for a job when school ended…she reminded me that I was fourteen years old and could not expect to live in luxury at the expense of father forever’. Traditionally all over the world children have to work to get through life, but in Yen Mahs case it would probably only be her having to work, as she was the ‘unwanted one’.
Yen Mah managed to overcome the death of her grandfather and carried out the rest of her year at ‘Sacred Heart School and Orphanage’. Suddenly without warning she was asked to go home, the chauffeur picked her up and took her home. When she arrived home she was asked to enter her father’s bedroom, ‘The Holy of Holies’. Yen Mah had won the play-writing completion she had entered some months ago. For the second time in her life her father was proud of her, ‘it was announced today that 14-year-old Hong Kong school girl Adeline Jun-Ling Yen won first prize in the International Play-writing Competition…our sincere congratulations Adeline Yen for bringing honour to Hong Kong’. Yen Mah finally had a father, ‘I was quite pleased to tell him you are my daughter’. The superstition that Yen Mah was ‘bad luck’ had been lifted, she had her father back and the chance to go to medical school in England. ‘That’s a foolproof profession for you…father I shall go to medical school in England and become a doctor, thank you very, very much’.
Adeline Yen Mah had overcome all of the traditions, culture and historic problems that faced her, and had been rewarded with her father classing her as his daughter again and she was able to travel to England, far away form all of China’s upheavals.
